He was definitely mostly bad for the USSR. Compared with Lenin,
Stalin was an effective leader and actually politician who did modernize the country but put lots of people into death cruelly at the same time. Actually, most of the improvements only really concerned the industrial workers in towns. The result of Collectivization was 5 million peasants were arrested and killed because of their resistance.
Another 5 million peasants were starved to death during the Famine of 1932. Not to mention how many innocent zeks died in the gulags for starvation and hard labor.
Some people say: “Every revolution is a sacrifice of the present to the future.” Just like what Stalin had said: “You cannot make omelet without breaking the eggs.” Is it true? Stalin kept saying it was
“necessary”, but really, there is no any other way to solve the problems? I do not think so.
Stalin was a paranoid person, so he wanted to dispose all the followers of the guy who against him and anyone who served Lenin when he was alive. Here came the purges and Show Trails.
Lenin did use terror (Cheka and that Polish freak called Dzerzhinsky at the head of it) but it was certainly not on the same scale as Stalin's totalitarian terror. Besides, socialism wasn't properly established in
Lenin's time. To some degree, there were reasons to account for his use of violence (Civil war, social revolutionaries...etc.), but Stalin's terror was unaccounted for. He was a totalitarian dictator.
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